It's a Wide, Wide, Wide, Wide, World

And these two new cameras take glorious advantage of it.

The best weeks of directing are the ones on the mixing stage. It's the last place where you get to make your movie better--adding funny sound effects and music like Lyle Lovett's cover of "Little GTO," and replacing dialogue ruined by airplanes and loud trucks. On RV, I thought it would be fun to record the whole mixing process using two new cameras.

Most movies are filmed in the 16:9 format, which means the picture is almost twice as wide as it is tall. (RV was shot even wider, in the 2.35:1 format, my thinking being that it is the same shape as the RV itself.) Almost all of the new digital televisions--DLP, LCD, and gas plasma--are designed for the 16:9 format. But most cameras still shoot in the old television format (4:3), almost square. Both cameras I tested this month take full advantage of the wide-screen format.

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The very cool, incredibly small [1] Sanyo Xacti HD1 ($800; sanyodigital.com) is a 720p high-definition video camera with no moving parts. Instead of tape, it uses SD media cards and can record 28 minutes of high-quality video on a two-gigabyte card. This camera is unlike any other high-def consumer product in terms of size, convenience, and cost. Designed to be held vertically in one hand, the Xacti has a 5.1-megapixel camera that you can use to take photos even as you're shooting video. (The video pauses when you take a still shot, then starts filming again.) The image quality isn't as good as the bigger, more expensive 1080i Sony high-def consumer camera (see box below), and in low light (like on a mixing stage) the image becomes somewhat grainy and pixelated. Still, it was a lot of fun to connect it to my big-screen plasma television and watch the mixers smile lovingly as I asked for the hundredth time if the sound of the geyser of fecal matter exploding out of the RV had enough manly subwoofer.

I also tested the new [2]Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1 ($600; panasonic.com) 8.4-megapixel still camera, which has a chip that lets you shoot in the 16:9 ratio. In most group-photo situations, you move back to get everyone in the picture, making your friends' faces too small and showing uninteresting bellies and waists (at least in my case). With the 16:9 Lumix and its extraordinarily sharp 28mm Leica wide-angle zoom lens, you can fit everyone into your shot without backing up. Because of the wide ratio, your prints will have white borders on the top and bottom, but you can plug the camera directly into your fiat-screen television and view your photos uncropped. You can also shoot in traditional 4:3 and 3:2 formats. The camera itself is very light, and it has a big screen for framing and viewing (though, sadly, no separate optical viewfinder). Just the same, lining up the smiling sound-mixing team outside the Cary Grant Theater, having finished the mix and getting ready to move on to the next big one, is a photo I'll always cherish. The only question: What is the next big one?